I have noticed that the Apple mapping team, in their work within Kazakhstan, consistently mismapped various highway=* ways, for example:

• Mistagging of courtyard highways from highway=service to highway=residential.[2]
• Retagging of a highway=footway to a highway=residential, seemingly without any on-the-ground knowledge.[3][4]
• Various other bizarre additions or edits to service highways (also often mistagged), that I sometimes corrected or rolled back.[5]

If the Apple team does not have familiarity with how the highway tags are applied in a country[6] (a country here with a small OpenStreetMap community at that), or the specifics of urban development that span half the continent, then they, simply, should not map, and definitely not make the state of the map ever so slightly worse.

• [1] Betteridge’s law of headlines applies…
• [2] osm.org/way/458088367
• [3] osm.org/way/458088370 (both from the changeset 161673895)
• [4] Truly it isn’t a footway, as seen on Google Streetview, but may have been impassable for cars in the past!
• [5] Here, based entirely on my subjective idea that if there isn’t a curve in the highway area, then the highway centerline shouldn’t curve: osm.org/way/1192930242
• [6] There aren’t Kazakhstan-specific guidelines, but the Russian guidelines are applicable, where внутридворовые проезды (courtyard passages) are highway=service: osm.wiki/RU:Highway_classification

P.S. If anyone wants to fix the scary copy-pasted magically north-aligned square houses that were mapped all across the country, which previously, in part, made me register an alternative account and instead map pointless foreign stuff you’re welcome :P